A DIP INTO MURDER
ROGER ORMEROD
© Roger Ormerod 1978
Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1994 by First Linford Edition.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
1
I have often noticed that men have this habit of whispering the bad news to each other and keeping it from the women. This time it began when somebody approached the other side of our table and bent over my companion’s ear. Goodliffe looked startled. The whisper then moved on, circling the dance floor and extending the alarm like a hissing fuse.
I sat and smiled, but I was fuming. The fuse touched every male who might have been concerned about the factory. It missed me. Yet I was equally concerned; more so than most of them, really, because it was my money and my income they were looking alarmed about.
Goodliffe got to his feet. As Works Manager, he had to take the lead. Thin, harassed and balding, he looked down at me, frowned as though I was suddenly an encumbrance, and said:
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mallin, but something’s cropped up.” He managed a twisted, painful smile. “Fingers at the helm, you know.”
Then he looked round as though marshalling his forces, and marched out of the club. A dozen men trooped after him. Suddenly the place seemed empty, and a scattering of deserted wives looked from one to the other, pathetic but resigned. No doubt a few cars would be called up, and they would eventually reach their homes. But I was sixty miles from my home, and four miles from my Dolomite Sprint, which I had left in the company’s car park. Besides, it was nearly three in the morning, and there had been a vague mention of finding me somewhere to lay my head for what was left of the night.
Quite frankly, none of this — the visit to the Domino Club and the protracted revelry — had been in my itinerary. But I had gone along with it, rather enjoying being part of the factory for once; on the inside, so to speak. Now, suddenly, I was very much on the outside.
While I was selecting a cigarette and considering the unfairness of a still very masculine world, a tall and slim young man in a dinner jacket slid into the seat that Goodliffe had recently vacated. He had a strong, humorous face, with those firm creases round the mouth that come from smiling a lot, and he was doing it at that moment. His blue eyes smiled, too, crinkling attractively. I thought they were the most naive eyes I had ever seen, which just shows how wrong you can be. I should have been warned by his ears, great jutting ears, which he tried to disguise by wearing his fair hair wide above them. They were the ears of a listener, like radar installations, missing nothing.
“Goodliffe never had any manners,” he said with sympathy.
“He was upset, it seemed to me.”
“With good reason.”
“You know the reason, then?”
He nodded with the confidence of those who always know. “You’ve had a robbery, Mrs. Mallin.”
I should have been surprised that he knew my name, and that he had associated me so closely with the factory, but I was too busy being surprised that we could have such a thing as a robbery. I mean, this was a heavy engineering complex of nine factories, not one of which manufactured anything easily moved, or which could be sold once it had been. I was unable to imagine a fence — as my husband David calls them — accepting two dozen motor bus chassis frame members.
I tried the effect of a dismissing laugh. “I expect some scrap merchant’s crawled under the fence and chopped off ten yards of lead pipe ... ”
He shook his head and leaned forward, cutting me short by clicking his lighter in front of my cigarette.
“It’s thirty-seven tons of steel.”
As he could not have been associated with the factory — otherwise he would have left with the others — I was intrigued that he knew so accurately what it was.
“You’re a reporter,” I suggested.
“Definitely not. I work for nobody but myself.”
“Then I take it you’re working now?”
“Not what you’d call work.” His smile was meaningful. “Pleasure, more like.”
I looked at him doubtfully. He was seizing the opportunity to pick me up, but I guessed there was something more to it than that.
“And all this steel has been stolen from the factory?” I asked casually, probing.
He came in just a little too eagerly. “I could run you down there, if you haven’t got your car.” Then, seeing my suspicion: “It’s not fair to leave you out of it.”
“Judging by your interest — ”
“Concern for your company,” he murmured.
“ … I’d say you were more concerned about being left out of it yourself.”
He grinned at me. “You’re very quick. Just say I’m nosey, will you!”
“Abnormally,” I agreed.
“But really, it’s quite exciting, isn’t it?”
“That wasn’t quite what I was thinking.”
“Of course not,” he said quickly. “You’ll be worried, being part of it. It was rotten of them just to clear off like that.”
“I might take you up on that offer.”
“Well fine.” He was like an eager boy, though close to thirty, I would have said. “I’m Peter Clarke. Call me Peter. You’re ... Elsa, I believe?”
I couldn’t help laughing. I collected my handbag and stood up. “You take a lot for granted.”
“I’m sorry. But they shouldn’t have left you here, when you were good enough to present their awards.”
It was quite true, I had presented them. This was because the Managing Director’s wife, who usually made the presentations every November, was ill. So they’d asked the only female member of the board. That’s me. E. Mallin; it’s there on the letterheads.
I had been flattered and interested. It’s all very well attending board meetings at an impersonal office in Birmingham, but I had never been to the actual factory complex. Somehow it had seemed a masculine stronghold, but the presentation was to be in the central canteen, and there had been every likelihood that I would actually see what went on to earn me my dividends. Or failed to go on, more recently, because the dividends had become smaller and the share value had slumped. I wanted to see the wheels of industry turning, if not actually pounding. But all I had seen had been that wretched canteen, and a more depressing place I have never entered.
Every year they had these awards — badges for this and that; long-service, suggestions, safety, enterprise — gold watches and scrolls. Anything but actual spending money. This year there were three special awards, which made it all something unusual. These three individual medals had been struck for gallantry, for the three members of the Works Police who had foiled a wage snatch a few months before. £80,000 in wages it had been, and all very exciting at the time.
I felt like a general, lifting the treasured awards from their velvet beds and pinning them on. I looked into three pairs of proud eyes and wondered if they felt, as I did, that we might have slipped them £100 as a bonus. Very nearly I kissed them on the cheeks, but restrained myself. I’m sure the thin one detected the sudden, wild desire in my expression.
We followed that with a restrained and inexpensive celebration, until Goodli
ffe, who had MCd it all, suggested that we might go on to the Domino Club, at his expense. But he did not do so until the awardees had disappeared, either to their posts or their homes, so that the invitation included only the odd dozen executives and head office staff, with their wives. Even so, I think at that stage he was slightly drunk. I heard later that his divorce had come through the day before.
I decided at that time that I would be getting along, but Goodliffe insisted I should accompany him. Heaven knows what wild ideas he had, because I already have a serviceable husband, but he wouldn’t listen to quite reasonable arguments about having nothing to wear. Although I had an overnight bag in the Dolomite, it didn’t fit this sort of emergency, so I finished up, a little angry, in an appalling ladies’ washroom, attempting to transform myself into something devastating for the evening, and wondering whether the Domino Club was too high class for the trouser suit that had seemed appropriate to the factory.
The company grounds occupy about a square mile right in the centre of the Black Country, straddling a canal that used to be its lifeline. From there, you can go in any direction for twenty miles without losing sight of chimneys and factories and industrial sites. The Domino Club was only four miles away, and by some miracle of modern science they had landscaped a few slag heaps and an outcrop of shale, persuaded a dozen weary sapplings to raise their heads, and slapped in the middle of it a building that should have gazed placidly over blue Mediterranean seas. The disused canal had been broadened, nudged in peculiar directions, and now helped to fill an old clay dig. The ruins of the pottery in the background carried a bank of floodlights, confining the view at night to the water and the sad, leaning walls, so that you’d almost expect a gondola to creep romantically into view. They’d had the nerve to build a terrace overlooking all this. Soft music gently played out there, and a high glass wall held at bay the cold and the smell from the stagnant water.
Goodliffe drove me there in his works car, and suddenly, stepping out beneath the lighted portico, I was no longer in the Midlands. Everything was done superbly and efficiently. My trouser suit was a disaster, but you walk with your chin high and your self-confidence at full mast, and you can get away with anything. After all, the club itself was doing exactly the same.
I was not greatly entertained. I danced a little with various vast and gentle ex-welders, who had taken a rise in status and a fall in pay to join the staff, and about two o’clock Goodliffe began to paw my hand. I could hardly ask to be taken home, as I couldn’t remember to whose home I had been vaguely invited. I was afraid it might turn out to be Goodliffe’s. It was soon after then that he left me.
So the appearance of this Peter Clarke chap was a relief. At least he was sober and polite, and somehow interesting. He escorted me out to his car, a Cortina station wagon, and during the four mile trip he brought me up to date with the facts.
The robbery had been discovered when the night guard at No. 3 gate had failed to report in to Control Office. The guard at No. 7, which was the nearest, being asked to check, had taken a short cut through Heavy Axle Case factory ...
“Heavy what?”
“It’s back axles for lorries and wagons,” he explained. “Great thumping things, two hundredweight and more, and six feet long.”
“It all sounds very big.”
And on opening the top delivery doors of the factory, which did not happen to be running a night shift at that time, he had put on the lights to see, at once, that the half dozen electric fork-lift trucks were not all sitting, as they should have been, in their charging bays. Three were scattered around loose. There had also been a noticeable gap where thirty-seven tons of steel plates should have been stacked.
“They start off as three foot six by one foot by half inch sheets of steel,” Peter Clarke explained.
“And it’s all gone?”
“So I believe.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
I thought he grinned, but the street lighting was poor. “It’s my job. I live by knowing a lot about things.”
“You’re a detective!” I said, delighted, because I feel at home with detectives.
He seemed to shudder. “Heaven forbid.” He changed down. “We’re here.”
I had not realised that we were approaching the company grounds, because my earlier introduction had been at the main entrance, where something had been done with the administrative offices to suggest a sober sense of purpose. We were now approaching from the opposite direction, and all I could see was blocked and massive buildings. They stood starkly against the racing clouds, and the moon laid a deathly glow on their windowless walls.
We drove in through gate No. 7. I ought to explain at this point that the term ‘gate’ is misleading. This one was marked up as GATE 7, but there was no sign of a gate, nor of any pediment that might ever have supported one. It was simply a wide opening in the chain link fence, guarded by a police hut. I discovered later that there were eight of these gates. With the exception of gate No. 3, which indeed possessed a great steel double gate and a guard hut, they were all wide open.
This gate No. 7 was not, at the time we entered it, actually guarded by the works policeman in his hut, because this man was the man who had discovered the theft. The hut door was open. Light streamed out, and I caught a glimpse of a small electric fire glowing in the rear, a bench and a chair.
We drove on into the grounds. Peter obviously knew his way around, though actually the destination was obvious. One of the huge blocks of building was bathed externally with lamps attached on the walls. From inside the factory a blue glow escaped by way of the lifted roller doors.
Peter parked the station wagon. We were in the shadow of a wastebin larger than the car. There was a vague murmur and mutter in the air, and a rhythmic thumping that I seemed to feel rather than hear. As we got out, he noticed me looking around.
“There’s three of the other factories working nightshift,” he explained. “That’s the big presses in Motor Frame you can hear.”
Every thump, presumably, denoted one more motor frame. It was a solid and lucrative sound. “Where’s everybody gone?” I said. “Are they in here?”
Cars were scattered in the wide works roadway.
We entered beneath the raised roller door. I was aware of a sweet smell of hot oil and mains gas, and the persistent hiss of escaping air or steam. But apart from that the echoing vastness of the factory building was still. The roof — this end of the factory, anyway — towered high above me, and way up in the latticework of roof supports blue-white floods blazed down. But the area was too large for them, and the light stretched itself to the limit to reach all corners, so that deep shadows loomed, and high, tilted shapes seemed to tower around me.
Distant voices were echoing in the far reaches, but the actual words resounded in all directions, fell back on themselves, and became a jumble. Far off there was the rise and fall of a police siren, but why the streets should need clearing at that time of night I couldn’t understand.
“All big presses this end,” said Peter. “That’s why the roof’s so high. They start things off. It all finishes down the far end, where they dip ’em in a paint tank, then load ’em for despatch.”
“Then why,” I asked, “is everybody down that end when the theft was from here?”
My question was given added point when the police siren died, and this too seemed to come from the despatch end of the factory. At the same time, my eyes achieved a degree of accommodation, and I was able to see clearly what Peter had already described. Just to the left of the entrance, three yellow fork-lift trucks were lined up in front of six wall-mounted battery chargers, and three were scattered around haphazardly. Behind them was the only area of concrete floor not cluttered by shapes in steel. Where thirty-seven tons of steel should have been stacked, there was nothing.
“I think ... ” Peter paused. He cocked his head to the resonant shouts. “I think, Elsa, you shouldn’t go any further.”
A
more annoying remark I have never heard. He’d offered to bring me there, had actually done so, and now, when I’d seen nothing, he suggested I had seen enough.
“Do we go through the factory, or carry on down the road?”
He shrugged. “We go through, if you insist. Watch the swarf on your shoes — it cuts them to pieces.”
He led the way, and now I was able to see that there were clearly-defined walkways between the machines and the piled shapes, which I could only assume were these back axle things on their way towards completion. The presses Peter had mentioned reached high towards the roof. The smell of gas was stronger.
He was speaking absently, his ears reaching forward for clues as to the activity. “When they’re working,” he said, “the floor shakes, and you shout right against people’s ears. Here’s the seam welders, and gusset welders — you know gussets — then they put the rings on ... Lord, you should get yourself a guide.”
“You’re doing very well. You must have worked here.”
“No. Too noisy for me. But I’ve been through, and I’ve got friends.” Now I could see shadows moving down the far end, men gesticulating, and a great echoing of shouts bounded from walls and roof.
For some reason I suddenly felt nervous, and reached in my bag for a cigarette. But Peter touched my arm.
“I shouldn’t. A flame could be dangerous. Can’t you smell it?”
I suppose that partly I’d wanted to smoke to cover the smell. This was a new smell, which completely blanketted the mains gas. It was sweet, with a pear-drop underlay, a smell I had difficulty identifying. But Peter was now ahead of me. He seemed to be hurrying. I increased my pace.
“The paint,” he said. “It’s highly inflammable.”
The smell was now thick and sickly, and ahead of me I saw a sign that prohibited smoking.
“Is it usually this bad?”
“No. Something’s happened. There’s hundreds of gallons of red primer in the paint dip, but it doesn’t usually smell this bad. Unless they’re dipping something ... ”
A Dip Into Murder (David Mallin Detective series Book 10) Page 1